10/23/2015

A Few Thoughts (Not) on the Benghazi Hearings

As the Rude Pundit read the many reactions to Hillary Clinton's calm yet forceful, emotional yet controlled testimony before the House Special Committee on the 2012 Benghazi consulate attack, he kept thinking about how he would approach writing about the excruciatingly long day. He thought about wonderful metaphors involving how Clinton used various implements to anally assault the oily, sweaty, pre-lubed Trey Gowdy. He thought about Clinton as Godzilla destroying the GOP Tokyo they had erected in the room. He contemplated playing it totally straight with analysis followed by a victory lap of sorts because of how completely the day made Clinton look like she was already president, a grown-up facing down fit-throwing children. All of these things and more stirred around in his head.

Then it struck him: Fuck these fuckers.

The Rude Pundit is sure he speaks for more than a few Americans who are sick and goddamn tired of Republicans trying to tell them that something is the most important thing in the history of ever when, in reality, it's virtually meaningless. Just because the advanced syphilitics of the GOP caucus and their media crotch-lickers say we need to care about something doesn't really mean we need to care about it.

Maybe this is a grudge held over from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, when we were supposed to care that Clinton lied under oath about getting some hot oral action in the Oval Office. You could walk the streets in those heady days in the late 1990s and look into people's eyes and recognize that we all knew the whole thing was utter and complete bullshit. Only the scabbiest and most deranged among us fell for the con job that was being played by Republicans and the press, which, at the time, was so desperate to prove it wasn't liberal that it didn't feel free to call "bullshit" where bullshit had piled up. We knew it was nothing. And, in the end, it really was a worthless exercise.

But once again, here we are, indulging the right-wing delusion machine. Its candidates have no record to run on, no ideas that will actually help the country, and no connection with the reality of most people's lives right now, so all it can do is convince us that Hillary Clinton did Something Bad and we're supposed to respond with either "Yes, that is Something Bad" or "No, that isn't Something Bad at all," which just proves their idiotic point. The Rude Pundit wants to suggest another path: There is nothing to respond to.

No one needs to ever think about Benghazi again. No one except people in charge of making our foreign agents secure needed to think about it again starting pretty quickly after it happened. It's almost hilarious that there are Americans who believe this is the greatest scandal since that time we elected a Muslim. How sad. How boring. How predictable, that so many people will allow themselves to be so blatantly and openly manipulated into anger about an event that has no effect on their lives at all unless they are somehow connected to the dead and injured by more than shared citizenship.

So, no, there will be no poring over the transcript here to reveal exactly how big the assholes on the committee were to Clinton. There will be no reveling in how Clinton spanked the Republicans constantly. Because we don't need to. We know it was a useless exercise with only one conclusion: The GOP is a dishonorable party of America-hating scoundrels who don't care what they destroy in order to impose an anti-middle and -working class ideology on the nation. Everything they do exists only to achieve that. And the lies they want us to believe and the nonsense they want us to care about are merely the shiny objects to distract us.

To put it more simply, talk to us when you hold goddamned hearings on cops shooting black people or over-armed whites gunning down students. Those dead Americans matter far more to the everyday lives of everyday people than 100 Benghazis.

"We're so much better" than the hearing, Rep. Elijah Cummings said in one of his many honorable and inspiring moments. "That's not what America is all about." As much as we want to believe that, unfortunately, we are shown time and again, that this is exactly what America is about for too, too many Americans.